ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Congressman John Dingell (D-MI), the longest serving member of Congress in history (59 years), did much good and much bad. Reports of his retirement stressed his work in championing Medicare, civil rights legislation, and several environmental laws. Less noticed was his v...

One of the many problems with the current banking system is that your tax money helps fuel speculation. Unless there is a public bank that your local government can place deposits into, revenues are the playthings of big banks.
Some of that money will go toward inv...

I am not an expert on Keynes, nor even—thank God—an economist (!), but the malarkey tossed around about how the Obama stimulus prevented another Great Depression and is responsible for the present prosperity we now allegedly enjoy (if only those churlish Republicans w...

Panchimalco, El Salvador — Thirty years ago, on a miserably hot and humid July day in 1983, I went to Washington DC with my wife and two-year-old son in his stroller. We were there with tens of thousands to protest US involvement in civil wars in Nicaragua...

Empires as National and Cultural Megalomaniac Dreams
Once upon a time, national entities and cultures aspired to build empires. The impulse was the erroneous assumption of being a superior civilization. It was about exporting an extensive set of as...

“Big ‘stupido’…running up to get an Oscar dying with excitement only to crawl back dying with shame (because a different director wins). Those crummy Academy voters; to hell with their lousy awards. If ever they did vote me one, I would never, nev...

Wrapping up a two-day trip to Saudi Arabia recently, a high-ranking State Department official sharply criticized the ruling family’s egregious and intensifying human rights abuses.
“Lack of progress in Saudi Arabia has led to a great ...

Bosses hate a salt—a pro-union worker who’s taken a job with the intent to organize.
A few unions are recruiting salts these days, usually young people who apply for low-wage jobs in retail, hospitality, or logistics. But unions are reluctant to talk about salt...

They refer to themselves as “spaths”. “Empaths” are those of us with empathy. Just a little something I learned while navigating the web for information about sociopaths. Seems they’re everywhere—significant others, neighbors, the men and women elected to repr...

In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.”
To the hundreds of families on the list of those harmed in Pennsylvania fracking country, these words do not ring true. With a legislative and executive branch virtua...

To go to an afternoon concert is to step into the past, and not only when the music to be heard happens to have been composed long ago. By its very placement after that increasingly rare caesura in the work or school day once known as a lunch break and before the promised...

Real estate in China has experienced a remarkable expansion in recent years. This development, however, has not gone parallel with the demand for real estate. If the situation reaches a crisis point, the consequences will be serious for the Chinese economy and for the wor...

Sane news coverage of Bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox‘s collapse would look something like this:
“Wow! The Internet’s largest Bitcoin exchange just vanished into thin air … and instead of collapsing, Bitcoin is still trading at about $500! What a robust, resilient ...

Karl Marx’s famous dictum sums up my teaching philosophy: “The philosophers of the world have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” As I came to see it, Marx had uncovered the inner workings of our society, showing both how it funct...

It’s not just that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was a coward for fleeing in the dead of night from angry and rebellious Ukrainian nationalists in Western Ukraine to what (he hoped) would be a friendlier population in the Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine. Of cou...

The two countries I know best are India and the US. I spent the first 22 years of my life in the former, and the following 24 in the latter, where I continue to live. Recently I returned home, after spending three months in India. The combination of what I saw there in pl...

Much like a perfect storm at sea is the consequence of three converging bad weather fronts, three significant global economic trends have begun to intensify and converge in recent months: (1) a slowing of the China economy and a parallel growing financial instability in i...